Chapter7

Embedding Apprenticeship Strategies in Subject Area Classrooms

Themes and Messages:
Teachers make the classroom a safe place for reading by modeling these strategies and allowing students to see the teacher's confusions and false starts when reading.

Key Questions for School Librarians:

Strategies:
Thinking on Paper

• As they read the text students write notes in the margins of their text about what they are thinking, questioning, and not understanding
• Students meet in groups of four to share their reading processes and to clarify vocabulary, ideas, and responses to the text
• Full class discussion where the students question the teacher about the reading
• This method gives students time to reflect and articulate their reading processes and comprehension problems before participating in the small group discussion

Literature Circles

• Students' chose the novel they will read
• Students' set the schedule and group expectations for completing the novel
• Students' participate in and observe fishbowl discussions - the group inside the fishbowl discusses their novel while the students' outside of the fishbowl observe and rate the discussion

Triple Entry Journals

• Writing page is divided into 3 columns
• In column one the student summarizes the text read and a golden line form the text that represents the theme of the portion read
• In column two the student writes "one more question(s) I have about
• In column another student in the group will write questions and opinions about the student's summary and golden line as well as writing any additional questions that have not been asked yet.

Voice-Over

• Each student calls up a voice in his or her head that they can imagine speaking in the style of the text given out in class.

Notes on the Chapter:
"The vehicle for inquiry is an ongoing metacognitive conversation, in which both the teacher as master reader and the students as reading apprentices attempt to make visible their processes of puzzling through texts." (p.118)
The Thinking on Paper strategy has been found to be particularly helpful for English as a Second Language students. (p.119)
Teacher think-alouds "make it safe for students to take risks in the classroom community." (p.123)
"Students will begin to see that confusion is a natural state of being for all readers at various points in their reading experience." (p.123)
"Summarizing with pictures stimulates the visual thinking that students must do to understand the physical processes of science." (p. 126)
"Different readers chose different strategies and that individual students chose different strategies to support their comprehension at different times." (p. 129)